A Nightmare on Elm Street

Time Out by

There are some genuinely frightening dream sequences - and some throwaway black humour...it's all good scary fun."

Chicago Reader by J.R. Jones

Here the idea of sleep as the ultimate threat is still fresh and marvelously insidious, and Craven vitalizes the nightmare sequences with assorted surrealist novelties.

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

A Nightmare on Elm Street is tailor made for those who like their gore leavened with thought-provoking ideas - something that is a rarity in this genre.

Slant Magazine by Nick Schager

Nightmare’s skill wasn’t that it invented such associations—which had already been thoroughly mined by its ’70s predecessors—but that it refined them in uniquely disturbing ways, drenching itself in an atmosphere of unreality positioned somewhere between waking and slumbering states.

Washington Post by Paul Attanasio

For such a low-budget movie, Nightmare on Elm Street is extraordinarily polished. The script is consistently witty, the camera work (by cinematographer Jacques Haitkin) crisp and expressive.

The New York Times by Vincent Canby

A Nightmare on Elm Street puts more emphasis on bizarre special effects, which aren't at all bad.